Redemption Ark

Pauline Sukhoi did not use an exoskeletal rig herself. When she met with Clavain she did so in a form-fitting travelling couch in which she lay almost horizontally, on her back, labouring for breath between each utterance. Like much else on the ship the couch had a crudely welded makeshift look. The manufactories were running around the clock to make weapons, combat equipment, reefersleep caskets and spare parts; anything else had to be knocked together in less sophisticated workshops.

‘Well?’ Sukhoi asked, the force of the acceleration heightening her haunted appearance by pulling her skin deep into her eye sockets.

‘I need seven gees,’ Clavain said. ‘Six and a half at the very least. Can you give it to me?’

‘I’ve given you everything I can, Clavain.’

‘That’s not quite the answer I wanted.’

She threw a schematic against one wall, hard red lines against corroded brown metalwork. It was a cross section of the ship with a circle superimposed over the thickened midship and stern where the hull was widest and where the motors were attached.

‘See this, Clavain?’ Sukhoi made the circle flare brighter. ‘The bubble of suppressed inertia swallows most of our length now, which is enough to drop our effective mass to a fifth of what it should be. But we still feel the full force of that five gees here, in the front of the ship.’ She indicated the small cone of the hull, jutting forwards of the bubble’s edge.

Clavain nodded. ‘The field’s so weak here that you need fancy detectors to measure it at all.’

‘Correct. Our bodies, and the fabric of the ship around us, still have nearly their full quota of inertial mass. The floor of the ship pushes against us at five gees, so we feel five gees of force. But that’s only because we’re outside the bubble.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘This.’ Sukhoi altered the picture, making the circle expand until it enclosed the entire volume of the starship. ‘The field geometry is complex, Clavain, and it depends complicatedly on the degree of inertial suppression. At five gees, we can exclude the entire inhabited portion of the ship from the major effects of the machinery. But at six… it doesn’t work. We fall within the bubble.’

‘But we’re already effectively inside it,’ Clavain said.

‘Yes, but not so much that we feel anything. At six gees, however, the field effects would rise above the threshold of physiological detectability. Sharply, too: it isn’t a linear effect. We’d go from experiencing five gees to experiencing only one.’

Clavain adjusted his position, trying to find a posture that would relieve one or more pressure points. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

‘But we’d also feel our inertial mass to be a fifth of what it should be. Every part of your body, every muscle, every organ, every bone, every fluid, has evolved under normal conditions of inertia. Everything changes, Clavain, even the viscosity of blood.’ Sukhoi steered her couch around him, collecting her breath. ‘I have seen what happens to people who fall into fields of extreme inertial suppression. Very often they die. Their hearts stop beating properly. There are other things that can happen to them, too, especially if the field isn’t stable…’ With effort, she looked him in the eye. ‘Which it won’t be, I assure you.’

Clavain said, ‘I still want it. Will routine machinery still work normally? Reefersleep caskets, that kind of thing?’

‘I won’t make any promises, but…’

He smiled. ‘Then this is what we do. We freeze Scorpio’s army, or as many of them as we can manage, in the new caskets. Anybody who we can’t freeze, or who we might need to consult, we can rig-up to a life-support system, enough to keep them breathing and pumping blood at the right rate. That will work, won’t it?’

‘Again, no promises.’

‘Six gees, Sukhoi. That’s all I’m asking of you. You can do it, can’t you?’

‘I can. And I will, if you insist upon it. But understand this: the quantum vacuum is a nest of snakes…’

‘And we’re poking it with a very sharp stick, yes.’

Sukhoi waited until he was done. ‘No. That was before. At six gees we are down in the pit with the snakes, Clavain.’

He let her have her moment, then patted the iron husk of the travel couch. ‘Just do it, Pauline. I’ll worry about the analogies.’

She spun the couch around and wheeled off towards the elevator that would ferry her down ship. Clavain watched her go, then winced as another pressure sore announced itself.

The transmission came in a little while later. Clavain scrubbed it for buried informational attack, but it was clean.

It was from Skade, in person. He took it in his quarters, enjoying a brief respite from the high acceleration. Sukhoi’s experts had to crawl over their inertial machinery and they did not like doing that while the systems were functional. Clavain sipped on tea while the recording played itself out.